A founder of comparative anatomy and giant of 19th-century biology, Georges Cuvier began publishing his 22-volume Histoire naturelle des poissons in 1828. Cuvier's history became a landmark survey in the science of fishes, delving back before the Greeks to the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians. As an introduction to this monumental work, his first volume traced the development of the study of fishes as he understood it and outlined the criteria for classification that his own work would follow. This critically important essay - arguably the first attempt at comprehensive marine biology - now appears in English translation for the first time, accompanied by rich annotations. Theodore Pietsch's commentary on Cuvier's Histoire naturelle des poissons returns this important volume to our attention and highlights its historical significance. Appreciative modern readers will include ichthyologists, evolutionary biologists, and historians of science.

A founder of comparative anatomy and giant of 19th-century biology, Georges Cuvier began publishing his 22-volume Histoire naturelle des poissons in 1828. Cuvier's history became a landmark survey in the science of fishes, delving back before the Greeks to the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians. As an introduction to this monumental work, his first volume traced the development of the study of fishes as he understood it and outlined the criteria for classification that his own work would follow. This critically important essay - arguably the first attempt at comprehensive marine biology - now appears in English translation for the first time, accompanied by rich annotations. Theodore Pietsch's commentary on Cuvier's Histoire naturelle des poissons returns this important volume to our attention and highlights its historical significance. Appreciative modern readers will include ichthyologists, evolutionary biologists, and historians of science.

Animals have been studied for centuries. But what are the most important and relevant reference and information sources in the zoological sciences? This work is a comprehensive, thoroughly annotated directory filled with hundreds of esteemed resources published in the field of zoology, including indexes, abstracts, bibliographies, journals, biographies and histories, dictionaries and encyclopedias, textbooks, checklists and classification schemes, handbooks and field guides, associations, and Web sites. A complete revision of the award-winning Guide to the Zoological Literature: The Animal Kingdom (1994), this new title includes extensive, up-to-date coverage of invertebrates, arthropods, vertebrates, fishes, amphibians and reptiles, birds, and mammals. In addition, the work features a detailed introduction by the author, as well as thorough subject, title, and author indexes. Students and researchers can now quickly and easily pinpoint works in their field of study. The book is of equal importance to LIS students specializing in science or biology librarianship, as it provides a comprehensive, straight-forward overview of zoological information sources. An essential addition to the core reference collection of public and academic libraries!

The story of natural history as seen through the lives, observations, and discoveries of the world’s greatest naturalists. We owe a debt of gratitude to the naturalists who described, experimented, collected, and gave us the means to understand the natural world. They came from all over the globe, from classical times to the end of the nineteenth century, when natural history changed from a mainly amateur pursuit to today's specialized scientific profession. Braving dangers—including storms, pirates, and disease—in pursuit of cataloging the natural world, pioneers such as Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin changed the course of science with their groundbreaking theories. This book includes many naturalists who are well known, such as the earliest great natural historian, Aristotle; Carl Linnaeus, the man who brought order to nature; the ornithologist and painter John James Audubon; and Georges Cuvier, who established the concept of extinction. Others are now given their rightful place: Antony van Leeuwenhoek, who made his own microscopes and discovered bacteria; and Mary Anning, "the princess of paleontology," who had an amazing, self-taught talent for finding fossils. Many of these people were great artists as well as scientists, and The Great Naturalists is illustrated with a selection of beautiful and precise paintings and drawings of birds, animals, fossils, fish, shells, and rocks from the unparalleled collections of the Natural History Museum, London.

Since its invention by Andrea Alciato, the emblem is inextricably connected to the natural world. Alciato and his followers drew massively their inspiration from it. For their information about nature, the emblem authors were greatly indebted to ancient natural history, the medieval bestiaries, and the 15th- and 16th-century proto-emblematics, especially the imprese. The natural world became the main topic of, for instance, Camerarius’s botanical and zoological emblem books, and also of the ‘applied’ emblematics in drawings and decorative arts. Animal emblems are frequently quoted by naturalists (Gesner, Aldrovandi). This interdisciplinary volume aims to address these multiple connections between emblematics and Natural History in the broader perspective of their underlying ideologies – scientific, artistic, literary, political and/or religious. Contributors: Alison Saunders, Anne Rolet, Marisa Bass, Bernhard Schirg, Maren Biederbick, Sabine Kalff, Christian Peters, Frederik Knegtel, Agnes Kusler, Aline Smeesters, Astrid Zenker, Tobias Bulang, Sonja Schreiner, Paul Smith, and Karl Enenkel.

"Ecological questions are at the center of many of the most important decisions faced by humanity. Roots of Ecology documents the deep ancestry of this enormously important science from the early ideas of Herodotus, Plato, and Pliny; up through those of Linnaeus and Dawin, to those that inspired Ernst Haeckel's mid-nineteenth-century neologism ecology. Based on a long-running series of regularly published columns, this important work gathers a vast literature that illustrates the development of the ecological concepts, environmental ideas, and creative reasoning that have led to our modern view of ecology. Roots of Ecology should be on every ecologist's shelf."--Back cover.

Ben Lewin writes and directs this drama about the sexual awakening of a life-long polio sufferer. John Hawkes stars as Mark O'Brien, a writer in his late thirties who has spent his life lying horizontally in an iron lung since a debilitating childhood bout of polio. A poet and a romantic, Mark has lived a life devoid of sexual intimacy. When he is given the job of writing an article about the sex lives of the disabled, he arranges - with the support of his local priest, Father Brendan (William H. Macy) - to employ the services of sexual surrogate Cheryl (Helen Hunt). Their 'sessions' take Mark on an unexpected journey of discovery and self-awareness.